I didn’t waste time. The sawed off ten-gauge was right there, so I simply stepped over and jacked a cartridge in and swung it toward the gent, who was too busy glarin’ at me to draw his own artillery.
“You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Obstructing justice,” I said.
Rusty peered out, and then swung the door open.
“You got two choices. Leave now, or let yourself get frisked before you get taken to the boy. If you’re carrying guns or tools or keys, I’ll toss you in there with him.”
I thought that feller was going to explode, but he didn’t. He steered Queen out, and Rusty and me stood at the door a moment, watching the Braggs vamoose. They crossed the square and vanished somewhere.
“It ain’t over,” Rusty said.
“You mind watching the place? I’m going out there.”
“You’re crazy. They’re fixing to bust King out.”
“I think they were. But not now. Admiral thought he’d slip something to his boy. I’m going to wander into the Sampling Room.”
Rusty stared. “You’re crazy, Cotton. We’re in the middle of a jailbreak. What if they grab you and hold you hostage? Trade you for King Bragg?”
“Don’t do it. No trades. That’s an order. No matter what they threaten, just don’t.”
Dusty sighed. “Good way to get yourself kilt.”
“Where’s DeGraff?”
“He’s coming in at six.”
“All right, you’ve got the afternoon to kill. Talk to King. Maybe you’ll find out some things.”
“He’ll just tell me he’s pure as the driven snow,” Rusty said.
“He might be at that, Rusty.”
The deputy started wheezing. He thought that was pretty rich.
“Truth to tell, Rusty, I’m kinda itchy about this. I wish the trial had got into things a little better. Maybe the Bragg boy’s being hustled to a grave he don’t belong in.”
“He belonged in one by the time he was eleven,” Rusty said.
Rusty let me out. Doubtful was pretty quiet. It sure was a nice May day. There was a knot of horses down at the end of Wyoming Street, and most would be Anchor branded. I started with a sweep around the courthouse square, thinking it would make sense to look for surprises. I poked down alleys, looked into mercantile windows, and checked brands of horses. But I sure didn’t spot nothing amiss. I stopped in the courthouse, waved at yawning clerks, and peered into empty rooms, and then hiked out the main drag, Wyoming, toward Saloon Row. But I didn’t go into the Sampling Room. Not yet. I wanted to see what else was going on there. Like maybe a bunch of horses at the hitch rail in front of the Last Chance. There was only two or three nags there; not much happening in Upward’s watering hole. He was probably sitting on a stool there polishing the bar, which is what he did when there wasn’t anything else to occupy him. I liked Upward. One of these days he’d pour me a free drink. It hadn’t happened in three years, but it would. If Upward liked you, you could drink cheap.
Mrs. Gladstone’s Sampling Room was long and narrow, with double doors in front and a skinny bar down the right side. There was a row of tables along the other wall, and a sort of poker parlor at the rear, with a door going out to the two-hole piss palace. Only her customers never got that far. They mostly leaked into the alley, which didn’t improve the way things smelled around Doubtful.
I pulled open the door and stepped in. It sure was dark. Mrs. Gladstone, she hadn’t lit any lamps yet because the sun was still shining, and enough light got through the window in front to let her pour. She was behind the bar, not doing much of anything, wearing her usual white smock and one of them white thingamabobs on her hair to keep it from flying in all directions. But pretty near the whole payroll of Anchor Ranch was in there, all right. I didn’t see Admiral Bragg, or Queen, but the rest was lined up in a long solemn row down the bar, one foot to the rail, and a few was sitting at the tables. Her dealer, Cronk, sat at the rear, presiding over an empty green table with a single lamp burning to supply light to players. But he sure didn’t have no customers.
The place was uncommon quiet. Most of them slicks didn’t even have a bottle of Valley Tan in front of them. They was just standing there: Alvin Ream, Big Nose George, Spitting Sam. They was carrying sidearms, all right. There was a lot of metal hanging off of one or both thighs. Well, there was no law against it in Doubtful.
They looked me over, and I looked them over, and one thing was clear. The whole bunch of them was waiting for something.
TEN
Well, they sure weren’t missing anything about me. All them dudes was studying me like I was an anarchist or something. Their gazes was drifting toward my handgun, studying my boots for hideouts, checking the back of my neck for knives in easy reach.
Well, screw ’em. I spotted an opening between Big Nose George and Spitting Sam, and bellied up.
“Good afternoon, gents,” I said.
Mrs. Gladstone, she sort of sidled toward me, like maybe she wanted to steer clear of any lead flying in my direction.
“Red-eye, ma’am,” I said.
“Nice to see you, Sheriff. You hardly ever drop in.”
“Orderly place, ma’am. Sampling Room’s always quiet. Anchor Ranch folks are all model citizens.”
I was layin’ it on pretty thick, but no one smiled any. She brought the brown bottle and settled it in front of me, along with a tumbler and a pitcher of cold water. I thanked her.
“Looks like you got a full house this afternoon,” I said.
“My best customers,” she said.
But they weren’t buying much this afternoon. It looked like sarsaparilla in most of them beakers.
I poured myself a generous shot, and added a splash.
“Here’s to the Anchor,” I said.
That got me more silence.
“You fellers don’t want to salute the Anchor Ranch? What happened? You all draw wages?”
I couldn’t get a rise out of any of them.
“George, how come you ain’t toasting the Anchor? You got shut of the place?”
Big Nose George eyed me a moment. “Sheriff, Admiral Bragg, he’s just the finest gent this side of St. Louis, and we’d all be glad to toast our excellent employer. But we’re all going out on a picnic any time, and we’ll toast Mr. Bragg and his beautiful daughter Queen when the time comes.”
“George, that’s a noble idea,” I said.
Spitting Sam nodded solemnly. “We all love and respect Miss Queen, so it’s gonna be sort of a Sunday School affair, soon as we get word from Mr. Bragg.”
“Yeah, dat’s it,” said Smiley Thistlethwaite.
“Well, here’s to Queen,” I said, and sucked on the red-eye a bit.
“She’s a beautiful lady, Sheriff,” said a gent down the bar. He was one of them in the hanging party, so I gave him a cold stare.
After that, things dipped into silence again, but all them fellers was watching me, watching me sip a little, and maybe calculating how much the hooch might slow me down if it came to that. The hooch wouldn’t slow me down because I had no intent to pull the iron out of my holster.
This here was the strangest business I ever seen in a saloon. It was like a bunch of saints dropped in. They was all behavin’ themselves mighty fine, for some reason or other. It reminded me of one of them billboards put up by the Temperance women that said, “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine.” I always figured them women deserved it. But here was a whole saloon full of gents with their bark on, sippin’ sarsaparilla. Who was I to complain? Not a one of them was breaking any law, far as I could see. Mrs. Gladstone, she just nodded cheerfully and winked at me. I thought about arresting the whole lot and charging them with good behavior, which would have got them fined ten dollars and jailed overnight. No one in Doubtful wants cowboys around that are all behaving themselves. There ain’t a nickel in it.
I polished off my red-eye, left two bits on the counter, and thought to quit the place.
But firs
t I turned to Big Nose George. “You be kind to grandmothers and dogs now,” I said.
“I kiss grannies and kick dogs,” he said.
“I kick grannies and kiss dogs,” Spitting Sam said, trying to raise an argument.
But it didn’t fly. Them fellers standing along the bar, they just smiled and nodded.
There was no point hanging around the Sampling Room, so I pushed through the batwing doors onto the peaceful street, and wondered why it felt like the quiet before the storm. I howdied my way toward the courthouse square, and then I spotted that blood bay and palomino and another saddled nag in front of the Stockman Hotel. It wasn’t much of a hotel, four rooms and a dining room, but Doubtful didn’t need much of a hotel. It was mostly empty anyway, except for an occasional whiskey drummer peddling his sauce.
I’m always looking for ways to get into trouble. So naturally, I was wondering who belonged to that horse tied there beside the blood bay.
So I steered my aching feet—I’m enough of a cowboy so I hate to walk more than ten yards—over to the hotel. Riding boots, like most cowboys wear, are an invention from hell, and Western bootmakers ought to be hanged from the nearest hayloft. Sure enough, in the saloon and dining parlor on the left, there was Admiral and Queen, and with them was Judge Axel Nippers, the selfsame judge as sentenced the boy to be hanged. They was all chomping on filets of beef and mashed spuds. Last I knew, Judge Nippers didn’t own a saddle horse, which made me all the more curious about this business.
I decided then and there to have me some lunch. “Howdy,” I said.
Admiral, he nodded curtly, and Queen peered down her long nose at me, and the judge was too busy wolfing down beef to bother. No one was inviting me to the table, at any rate, so I continued on to another one within hearing distance.
Mrs. Garvey was all a-twitter. “Why, Sheriff, we’ve not seen you in here but twice.”
I couldn’t recollect when, but she knew more arithmetic than I did.
“I’ll have what they’re having,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll enjoy it. Sauteed filets in burgundy sauce, with pickled beets.”
I smiled, since I was getting in over my head. I like chicken-fried steak, maybe once a year, and deviled eggs now and then.
Well, whatever the palaver was at the other table, it quit real sudden, and that threesome was busy patting lips with real cloth napkins, and hurrying through the chow. I was sort of hoping to pick up a notion or two of what was happening around Doubtful, but I saw it’d be a lost cause. That bunch wouldn’t even talk about the weather.
I tackled them sauteed filets and pickled beets, and when she laid the bill on me, I pretty near fainted. It was about a week’s salary. And all I got for it was a mess of silence at the next table. Them three lapped up their chow and retreated, so I was all alone in there, dining like I could afford the ticket. I took a gander out the window, in time to see the judge walk back to the courthouse and the Braggs ride off, leading the spare and riderless horse.
It sure was funny. There was the Braggs, the judge, a spare horse, and down the street was every gun-toting hand the Anchor Ranch could come up with. But nothing happened. Or maybe something woulda happened if I hadn’t been barging around town, lookin’ after the peace. I thought I’d never know.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But the whole business was probably intended to bust King out of my hospitality and send him off to California or some awful place like that. Maybe they was gonna snatch the judge and then try to exchange him for King. Maybe this was some sort of jailbreak that I couldn’t figure out. Maybe not. Maybe them Anchor Ranch rannies was going on a picnic, just like they said. Someday, I’d get the rest of the story. Something like this didn’t just vanish into air. Someone would be babbling, and my guess was Queen.
I scraped the last coin out of my purse and laid it on the lady, and got out of there. It sure was a nice spring day. I didn’t see no riot at the jailhouse, or hear shots being fired, so I walked over there, knocked, and this time DeGraff let me in and locked the door behind me.
“Anything perky around here?”
“No,” he said. “I’m on catnap duty.”
“There’s something out there. A lot of Anchor men in town, at the Sampling Room. Admiral Bragg and his girl are floating around.”
“So I heard.”
“I can’t get a handle on it.”
“Maybe it’s nothing.”
We laughed.
I pulled a key off the wall and headed back into the cell block. There was four cells, two on a side, separated by an aisle. King was in the one farthest back and on the left. It was gloomy in there, with only a barred window high up tossing light anywhere.
King was pacing round and round his ten-foot exercise yard. There were thick iron bars between him and me.
“You all right?”
He stopped suddenly. “That’s not a question that needs answering.”
He had a disheveled look about him. First time I’d seen that. Somehow, he always kept himself neat.
“Your pa and sister came in.”
“I heard about it from your deputy.”
“I couldn’t let them back here without them being searched.”
“My father usually has a dozen plans all going at once.”
“I think he wanted to bust you out. There’s a lot going on around here I’m not smart enough to figure out.”
King smiled harshly. “I’m not either.”
“He was carrying. Maybe she was too. She had more metal in her underwear than a tool and die maker.”
“Don’t talk about my sister like that.”
“I figure he was going to slide you a derringer or two, and she had a collection of rat-tailed files and blank keys for you to work on.”
“I wouldn’t have taken them. I’m not interested in a breakout.”
I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. He was serious. His gaze fixed me intensely.
“You don’t know me,” he said. “I want one of two things. To be proven innocent and cut loose, or to die. I don’t want to be called an outlaw or a fugitive or a criminal on the run. I’m a proud person, Sheriff. I won’t go for half a life. I won’t go for a life on the lam. If he’d laid all that stuff on me, I’d have turned it over to you the moment they left here.”
He stared at me in a way that almost knocked me backward a step or two.
The thing is, darned if I didn’t believe him.
“Tell me again what you know,” I said.
“About that afternoon? I walked into the Last Chance for a drink. Yes, I was looking for trouble. I like trouble. I had a few drinks. Upward poured some red-eye, and I sipped, and heard some laughter behind me. That’s all I remember.”
“And?”
“I was on the floor looking up at several men. There was gunsmoke in the air. My six-gun, a Peacemaker, was in their hands, and every chamber was empty. If I did it, I did it. If I didn’t, I didn’t. I have nothing more to tell you.”
“Upward says he didn’t see it. He says he was in the storeroom getting a bung starter when he heard the shots. And he says the two witnesses, both T-Bar men, have drawn wages and vanished.”
“Then there is no witness you can call a liar,” King said.
“Was there anyone else in there?”
“A few T-Bar men.”
“That’s more than the court was told about. Do you know who?”
“I had my back to them, remember? I was buying some booze.”
“King, if you was to tell me what to look into, who to talk to, what would you tell me?”
“Crayfish Ruble was having some rustling trouble. Some mavericking too. He was itchy and wanting to stop it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Drovers talk, Sheriff.”
“What should I ask Crayfish?”
“Ask him about the rustling.”
King glared at me, wheeled away from the bars, and settled on his iron bunk. It was plain I wasn’t going
to get another word from him. I wanted to.
I didn’t much care for him, but somehow, I was coming to respect the boy. I knew I shouldn’t, but my pa was always telling me I’ve got no common sense.
ELEVEN
I hurried over to the courthouse, and found Judge Nippers in his office.
He turned toward me, scowling. “It’s about time you showed up.”
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Admiral Bragg had some plans for my future,” the judge said. He frowned until his weathered face looked like a creased prune. “But you changed his plans.” He glared at me. “Sit! Why are you standing there like an idiot? What are you, my butler?”
I eased down into one of them oaken swivel chairs, and pushed my holster around some so it wouldn’t jab at my leg. I never much fancied carrying six-guns all over. Them things are so heavy I’ll probably end up with one hip lower than the other.
“A social visit, he said. Lunch at the hotel. When I saw that extra nag tied next to theirs, I knew what’s what, and made sure I had my old pepperbox handy. You ever see one?” He pulled a pepperbox pistol out of his bosom. The thing had five barrels. By yanking on the trigger, one could move a loaded barrel under the hammer and discharge it. “Sprays a lot of lead, sometimes in my face,” he said. “Damn thing. But it’s a croaker, all right.”
He put it away, for which I was grateful because them pepperboxes are famous for going off unexpected.
Nippers adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and eyed me like I was some sort of dead fish.
“Admiral Bragg had nefarious designs, Sheriff. He wanted me to vacate the sentence, call off the necktie party, and when I told him the hell with that, he suggested maybe he’d carry me off and then trade me for the boy. Hold me hostage, in case that doesn’t quite sink into your noggin.”
I never heard that word nefarious before, but I sort of figured it out. “How was he gonna do that, Your Honor?”
“The virgin Queen had some artillery aimed at my crotch beneath the white linen tablecloth, he told me, and we’d casually finish our delicious repast, and then the Braggs would cheerfully escort me to the third nag out there, and we would cheerfully ride away.” He studied me to see if I was getting all this, and decided I was. “Only, you came in, which shifted the game a little. It no longer seemed like a good idea to shoot my balls off.”
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